There's a welcome mat at the door

And if you come on in

You're gonna get much more

There's my chair

I put it there

Everything you see

Is with love and care

            •           Diana Ross 

In what ways does Keeping Time get at infrastructure? I am thinking about infrastructure being below the structure, infra, meaning below. I am thinking about the ways infrastructure is used, played, and shaped in ways that are relational. My friend and roommate, Colin Delargy, told me that in urban planning and marketing, function is predicated on predictability in contemporary liberal worlds. You’re supposed to know how a space is going to be used, foresee it, underwrite it, pitch it, sell it, and police it. Basically, what is it going to do? We are going to create this path for a space and it’s never going to be relational. Relational meaning you put two things next to each other and who knows what’s going to happen. Of course, there’s tonality and texture to placing things next to each other, and not everyone or everything is going to work well next to one another.

A large portion of Keeping Time is set in the home of Ark band member Mekala Sessions, the house he grew up in and is fighting to keep. Mekala, along with his friends and bandmates, can be seen in the kitchen and living room, hanging out, searching for charts, and chatting on the phone. The band gathers in the garage—an extension of the home—to practice. Important moments unfold in the living room, kitchen, and on the front porch. The Ark's history is deeply intertwined with people's homes, with Horace Tapscott and other musicians, community organizers hosting events, music composition classes, and other musical education gatherings in his home. 

Ephemera from the Ark’s archive creates the aesthetic of the home, the tapes on the wall, used for learning and teaching songs, the charts that are missing, being found in different folders and cabinets in band members’s homes, posters on the wall, the band members showing up for paychecks, practices, phone calls, and the younger generation hanging out on Mekala’s couch in the living room. To build an infrastructure that can hold relationships, we don’t skip the hanging out, the chatter, the unannounced drop-ins, and overall gathering. 

I’ve had this question over the past few years of what and how can the moving image actually get at infrastructure? With getting at infrastructure, I mean what does it feel like? And it's specifically thinking about sensation as a way of interacting and knowing the world. I think sensation is under-exercised. For example, it’s hard to go into a city council or city hall meeting and talk about sensation—“No, but It felt like this”. But it's actually this. The feel of the infrastructure, the feel of it, is actually the thing. What filmmaker Darol Olu Kae offers us with Keeping Time is an opportunity for us to think about what it feels like for people to build and be part of infrastructures where you have the patience to wait in the uncertainty, to wait with the who knows what’s gonna happen?